Jellyfish-Powered Special Effects On Virtualized Desktops

By Adrian Bridgwater, August 01, 2014

Desktop-as-a-Service for Graphic Processing Units (DaaS - GPU)

What does a developer do when he or she wants more power? British cloud network provider Exponential-e is hoping that DaaS – GPU isn’t too much of an acronym to swallow and that its Desktop-as-a-Service for Graphic Processing Units (DaaS – GPU) could provide the answer.

The firm uses Nvidia GPUs in a virtualized desktop environment. The product has been developed in conjunction with Jellyfish Pictures, a London-based visual effects (VFX) studio.

Exponential-e CEO Lee Wade says that IT infrastructures can now be scaled so that VFX companies can meet tight production deadlines, while offering assurance to studios that they can successfully deliver on projects of any size.

Exponential-e’s hosted service sits on the Local Area Network (LAN) on the clean side of the firewall, negating any security or privacy issues. This means that Jellyfish Pictures no longer needs to rely solely on its existing architecture when further processing power or capacity is required. Instead, the company can spin-up additional resources on demand, such as blade servers and processing power.

"In the past, the huge amounts of processing power needed to render animated and motion content meant that artists, designers, and developers were tied to a physical desktop," comments Lee Wade. "However, the traditional workstation has been transformed by DaaS - GPU and Jellyfish Pictures is one of the first companies in the UK to adopt this operational model."

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